Poroshenko Calls On U.N. To Examine Prospects For Peacekeeping Mission For Donbass Region

President Petro Poroshenko has called on the U.N. to take concrete steps to deploy a peacekeeping mission in Ukraine, reports Agence France-Presse. 

A peacekeeping force could help bring the five-year-old war in Ukraine's eastern Donbass region to an end, Poroshenko said on Wednesday during a special session of the General Assembly. 

Poroshenko asked U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to send a fact-finding mission to the region to evaluate options. 

Any mandate should cover the entire Donbass region, including the Russian border, he said, as quoted by Interfax-Ukraine.

The mission should enable the "withdrawal of Russian troops and proxies and their weaponry from our territory," the president said. 

Poroshenko said that providing humanitarian aid and monitoring human rights in the region is not enough. He emphasized that little progress had been made despite a pledge from Guterres to prioritize Ukraine in 2018. 

Since 2015, Ukraine has repeatedly requested an international peacekeeping mission in the region, where Russian-backed separatists have been battling government forces. 

Moscow has said it would support a limited U.N. mission to protect observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in the region, reported Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. 

Fighting erupted in the region in April 2014, shortly after Russia illegally annexed the Crimean peninsula. 

More than 10,000 people have been killed and 1.5 million displaced in the conflict. 

An agreement negotiated in Minsk, Belarus, in 2015 remains largely unimplemented.